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X3 - Reunion

The makers of X Beyond the Frontier and X2 Egosoft bring you yet another space combat game X3. When you look at X3 you feel like you're right in the middle of a science - fiction movie. The game has stunning visual effects, which give some amazing views of the world where Julian Brenan (protagonist) belongs. Julian, who is the son of Kyle Brenan from X2, who helps Julian in his extraordinary journey in a galaxy far away from planet earth. X3 scores high on the graphics and visual aspects, which are of real high quality. The impressive space scenes are hard to miss. The ships are much more sleek and smarter then the ones in X2.You will find the visual effects to be spectacular. However, most of this action is restricted to the cockpit of the space ship and this tends to be a little disappointing, as you are involved in all the action only through the drivers seat.

X3: Reunion is mind-bogglingly beautiful. I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of simply looking at my surroundings while flying from one mission to another. Explosion effects and battle scenes also leave little to be desired as even the pickiest of gamers will simply drool over the graphics.

Shader model 3 is supported (and enabled)

X3 is a relatively new benchmark for us. So the charts look a tad weird, it's because the high peaks you see in there come from high-end graphics cards like the high-end GeForce 7900 series. From a graphics oriented view this really is one of the best looking games ever. The average framerate is based upon four large timedemo's which form the result. We enabled four levels of AA and sixteen levels of Anisotropic filtering here. This is a no-go for the Inno3D 7600 GST at 1920x1024 (which is nothing to be ashamed about really).

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter

In Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 3, players will embody Captain Scott Mitchell as he commands the Ghosts and Special Forces allies equipped with the IWS in the quest to save the president of the United States, recover stolen nuclear codes and eliminate a vicious band of renegade soldiers hell-bent on unleashing catastrophe. The game unfolds entirely in Mexico City, where numerous, thoroughly researched and detailed environments will deliver complete immersion into the future of urban warfare.

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay. The game itself looks great, and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version. In fact, it's so detailed that if you have the upcoming Aegia physics card, you'll see sparks bouncing off objects in the environment. Even if you don't have a physics card, though, there are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer. For instance, aluminum cans litter the street, and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound, which may betray your presence to the enemy.

Do we dare ? You need to have a graphics monster as graphics card as this baby can be hard on current graphics cards, even high-end ones. So we are playing the level Coup d' Etat (Checkpoint 2) here (fantastic level). Configuration wise we enable as always all eye-candy. This game does not support AA by the way. We have 16xAF enabled, and furthermore all settings set to high.

Side note though, this game detects and makes advantage of 512Mb framebuffered memory cards and then uses larger HQ textures.

• If you have a 256Mb card, texture quality will be forced towards medium and your maximum resolution towards 1360x768
• If you have a 512Mb card, texture quality will be set towards high and your maximum resolution towards 19x12 (in our case).

So if you have an expensive X1800 XT 256MB or GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB .. that kinda blows bigtime. As you can see we see "acceptable" framerates. The Inno3D GeForce 7600 GST is doing ~33 FPS at a 10x7 resolution in this game. It is playable yet even then can get laggy here and there